


On Malcador

by moreagaara



Series: Before the Imperium [5]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Before the Imperium, Blood Magic, Child Marriage, Clones, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, F/M, Fanfiction, Forced Marriage, Healing, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Injury Recovery, Literature, Monks, Mutation, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Pre-Canon, Recovery, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 11:30:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20638430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: Trigger warning:  Implied child abuse, forced child marriage





	On Malcador

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning: Implied child abuse, forced child marriage

Getting a wife had been simple. Entirely too simple, as far as Daenus was concerned; he had grown lonely in his home under the Himalayas, and had ventured into the village, where he had mentioned his seeking a wife. No sooner had the words left his mouth than the man who sold him chicken said his daughter needed a husband, and would Daenus be willing to take her? Slightly off balance, Daenus had agreed, and the ceremony was held a week later.

He followed the proper traditions and treated his wife as all proper circumstance demanded, even though she was barely twelve. She was clearly terrified out of her mind to be marrying anyone, especially the strange man who burrowed into mountains as a hobby; fear which Daenus suspected was not made easier by the fact that his experiments with genetic manipulations had turned him into a giant of a man. It still took her years before she warmed up enough to him to ask him what it was he did all day, and even then she clearly expected to be beaten for asking a question or perhaps speaking out of turn.

Instead, he smiled at her. “I’m working on some new forms of cancer treatments. Pancreatic cancer in this case…” he had then changed the language on the screen he was working on from English to Hindi, then explaining a little more thoroughly, but had paused when he noticed her staring blankly at the screen, brow furrowed. “…can you read?” he had asked.

She flinched. “It’s not right for a woman to read or learn,” she responded quickly, her cheeks scarlet, and she waited for a blow that never came.

“…that’s…that doesn’t make sense. How in the hells do they think the children learned before schools if the mother didn’t teach them?” Daenus muttered. “Do you want to learn?”

She had looked at him with fire in her eyes. “Yes.”

“Great, then hop up. We’ll start with Hindi.”

~~*~~

Aasmi was a voracious learner once given permission; she devoured book after book that Daenus got for her, and he had eventually given up and given her a computer of her own with access to the internet for her to learn from. By the time she was eighteen, she had dreams of college in America, and Daenus had no intention of shattering those dreams, though he did have her stay and learn English first.

Then began the long process of getting her a student visa; it took three attempts before it was granted. Once there, she attended a smaller university in California, eventually settling on medicine for her doctorate—although she got Master’s degrees in three other fields. By that point, she had truly become her own person, and Daenus loved her all the more for it. When she returned, excitedly telling him about how hard she had worked and all she had accomplished before coming home, she was thirty-five.

He picked her up in the airport, swooping her around in a hug, and earning them several disapproving stares. “They think women should not be so loving of their husbands,” she told him when he failed to pick up on the source of their anger.

“Eh, I’m thirteen thousand years old. I quit giving a crap a long time ago,” he told her. She grew quiet after that, all the way back to their home beneath the mountains.

“Thirteen thousand?” she had eventually whispered.

“…remember how I told you I’m a blood mage? One of the bonuses that comes with that particular field of study is functional immortality. I don’t…naturally get old,” he told her. In truth, he had been worrying over this fact the entire time she was away.

On the one hand, he knew he would outlive her. Aasmi was bright and beautiful, but she was mortal. She would die in all too short a time. There were ways to extend her life, of course, but most of them involved soul magic, and Daenus was damned if he went to Xander to ask for his help. Besides, Xander would probably refuse…partly to be contrary, but partly because of Daenus’s own fear that he was being selfish by refusing to let Aasmi go and die as the natural order dictated she must.

And yet she clung to him when they exited the car just outside the mountain’s entrance to their home. “I don’t want to lose you,” she whispered. “You gave me my life.”

“I’ll…I’ll see what I can do.” There had to be a way. One that didn’t involve soul magic. Not for the first time, he wished Horus was around to help him, but Horus—like all his brothers—was dead.

~~*~~

The first thing he attempted was to give her some of his own blood, charged to stop her from aging beyond the point she had already reached. It certainly seemed to work; Aasmi looked the same at forty-five as she had ten years earlier. It did not, however, stop her body from beginning to fail twenty years onwards, though it kept her looks. Even with the both of them working together to try and find a way, she still fell victim to her body’s mortal failings.

It was when she was nearing eighty that she brought up cloning; perhaps if he cloned her body, then found a way to call her reincarnation into it, she could live with him in immortality after a fashion. Yet when Daenus tried as much—uncertain exactly how he had managed to find the correct soul past the veil beyond death—the child had no memory of her old life, even after Daenus told her of it, and yet felt obligated to act as a woman she had never known to please the man she thought of as father.

Both of them could tell Daenus was hurt; the child-Aasmi decided in the end she would rather not live at all than continue to fail him through no fault of her own. Lacking any other ideas, Daenus repeated the experiment, meaning to do it properly this time—surely if he changed his approach to presenting the information—

But no. Three times he repeated the experiment, and three times she killed herself before she was fifteen. The fourth time, he held his tongue about the past. Every time before, Aasmi had been reborn as a new person; Daenus was the one who needed to let go of the past. And this time, she did not die before she was an adult. This time, it was her idea to get married in the village—long since grown into a city, and one of the more magnificent ones in India—when she was twenty; this time, she was the one who badgered him into letting her be a housewife and bearing his children. It was a point of pride for her to be so, and a small point of shame that she was only able to carry one of his children to term.

Daenus cared not, and made a point of saying that the fact they had even one child was a minor miracle, considering all the crap he’d put his DNA through. He did not dare tell her that her own DNA was likely unstable; he did not want her to know what he had done or to give her a reason to consider suicide again.

But Aasmi found out anyway, shortly after their son learned to walk. He’d wandered into the room where Daenus had been keeping his work on Aasmi’s resurrections, and naturally Aasmi had found it. She could read enough Hindi to piece together the basics of what this room was; enough information to confront Daenus about it.

He didn’t dare lie to her. He told her everything; her original life, how she had begged him to give her a chance to stay with him longer, how cloning had been the final solution the two of them had settled upon, the disastrous first three resurrections…he was weeping by the end of it; she was nearing forty now, and it wouldn’t be long before he would need to resurrect her again and raise her alongside their son.

She embraced him. “Promise me not to do it again,” she told him.

“I…promise. On all that is and has ever been holy.” Then he looked her in the eyes. “I don’t think I could bear to do it again, in any case,” he had cracked a small smile then, blood-red tears still streaming down his face.

“I think the gods meant for me to give you a son the first time, and let you bring me back so that I could do so in a later life,” she told him. “Now that I have given you Malcador, I think it is time for me to continue the cycle.” Religious faith shone in her eyes. 

Daenus hadn’t replied. The rest of her life—this time she barely reached sixty—passed all too quickly; Malcador loved his mother dearly, and mourned her with their father. It was his idea to bury her on top of the mountain they had burrowed under, but the epitaph was all Daenus’s own. _I will keep my promise _he wrote. Malcador—by then twenty—asked what he was referring to. And so Daenus had told him once they reached the old lab. Then he deleted all the information related to Aasmi’s DNA and destroyed all the samples he had kept.

Malcador understood. He always seemed to understand his father, at times better than his father himself did. “So if you’re a blood mage, does that mean I am too?”

“Yes. You come by it from your grandfather. I kind of wish I knew how to contact him…he’d like to meet you,” Daenus kept his notes on resurrection intact, but shelved them somewhere he was likely to forget they existed. “And to be honest, I should probably teach you how to use it before you leave for university like you’ve been asking. That way…if something terrible happens—gods forbid—you’ll at least be able to keep yourself alive long enough to make it home.”

Malcador proved as quick a study at blood magic as he had at everything else. In two years, he learned all that Daenus was willing to teach him, and so he left for university. Which university was still up in the air, but he promised to contact his father as soon as he found a suitable one.

Eventually he settled on somewhere in the country that had once been Russia, now part of the Greater United Asia, whose capital was Nanking by diplomatic arrangement. He reported eagerly through instant messaging and email on his progress in the field of rocket science, and excitedly told his father about his friends. Apparently they all believed that fate could be changed on a whim; anyone could change anyone’s fate with sufficient determination and strength.

Daenus only became worried when it had been more than a week since his son had contacted him through any means. He meant to arrange a trip to Russia to find him, but there soon turned out to be no need. His son had made it most of the way to him, but had passed out no less than two hundred feet from his doorstep.

He was in terrible shape; someone or something had forced his body to change in ways no human body was meant to change. Horns, wings, claws, one leg turned to a hoof, the other still human, his blood multicolored where it leaked from several open wounds, and turning to mushrooms where it hit the ground. Daenus gathered him carefully, trying his best to not jostle him, and turned to take him inside when someone shot him.

He stopped. Pivoted. Old rage simmered inside him, but he controlled it. His son needed him more than he needed to kill these fools who had apparently chased Malcador down. “Whatever promises the blood god made the ten of you, they’re lies. I would know,” he informed them coolly, and they laughed.

“Blood god? Ours is the Lord of Change, old man,” their leader—the one furthest gone with his transformation—smirked. “And if you’re sworn to the Blood God, you’re doing a hell of a poor job in showing it! A true devotee would have attacked us on sight!”

“And a true devotee would never have learned about your ‘lord of change’ as a result,” Daenus replied. Hopefully Tamdin was still alive… “Now, if the ten of you don’t mind, my son requires me.” He turned again, meaning to let them live as soon as he’d spoken to Tamdin about whatever they were talking about, but there were ten more gunshots and more laughter.

His son groaned; one of the bullets had gone through Daenus’s body and sunk into Malcador’s. Daenus took the time to push it out by manipulating his son’s blood and to seal the wound, though whatever magic his son had been dabbling in resisted his efforts. “Obviously you ten don’t know when to back down from a fight…” he spoke to the mountainside, carefully putting his son down and pivoting once again to stand between Malcador and his pursuers. “Even one you cannot win. In case your lord of change has not told you, I killed more than ten thousand in a weekend. A few _albalha’ _are barely worth the effort.” The Arabic word for ‘imbecile’ seemed appropriate in this moment.

“You killed ten thousand with the help of the blood god. You’re nothing without him,” one of the younger, slightly less mutated pursuers informed him before beginning a spell. He didn’t get to finish it, as his lungs filled with blood and he drowned under Daenus’s raised eyebrow.

“What a strange opinion,” Daenus commented as though they were all talking about the weather. The others, panicked, began their own spells individually, but all died promptly of exploded heads. Only the leader was smart enough to teleport away, likely banking that Daenus wouldn’t be able to track him. He was correct, but it had more to do with Daenus being more interested in Malcador’s well-being than in anything else.

Again he gathered his son, and was this time able to go inside without interruption; his own wounds had healed over with most of the bullets still embedded (digging them out was going to be a very entertaining experience), but his son was, if anything, worse. Daenus only had the time to get the blanket Horus had used so long ago to calm him down from his rages and wrap his son in it before he had to teleport to the cave he and his brother had once lived in.

The blood-based transit worsened Malcador’s condition sharply; the other leg was half turned to hoof, and he was beginning to develop fangs. He moaned wordlessly in pain as Daenus sprinted up the mountainside to the temple he hoped was still there. He nearly fell over when he reached the empty plain where it should have been, but remembered an incident once long ago where Tamdin had explained to him that those who left the sanctuary were not permitted to come back, when an old man who claimed to have once been a member of their order wandered the snowy plain where the temple both was and wasn’t. He had died up there, and had been left for the eagles on a different mountainside.

Daenus didn’t have the time for that. “Tamdin! My son needs your help!” Only silence and his son’s continued pained writhing answered him. “He ran afoul of a Lord of Change!” Still only silence, and a howl of the wind. “You don’t have to let me in, just Malcador!” They were both shivering now; Daenus was dressed for the heat of the jungle below, not for the bone-numbing chill of the high mountains. “Tamdin, please! I beg you!” Daenus shouted into the gusting wind; he knelt, trying to warm his son’s blood with his own magic, but it would not respond to him.

The footsteps of a large beast crunched before him; Daenus looked up in alarm, and saw the face of a great red serpentine dragon; a golden pearl glimmered in its throat, and the scales outlining its eyes and cresting from the back of its head shone with sunlight. _He looks nothing like Vestral, _he thought, somewhat giddy from the lack of oxygen at these altitudes. “Please,” he asked again; this time, he shakily pulled the blanket away from his son’s face to reveal what had been done to him—surely Malcador wouldn’t have been dumb enough to ask for this.

The dragon heaved a sigh. “I will let you both in, against my better judgement…” It stomped, and the gate appeared for Daenus and Malcador. Daenus hurried in, barely pausing to bow his thanks to the dragon, before heading to the central courtyard. The dragon ducked in behind them, becoming a monk as it passed the gate, and led Daenus to the building where the monks treated their sick.

Another monk stopped Daenus outside of it, and asked what had happened. “I’m not sure…my son went north, to Russia—” he used the old name out of habit “—he was studying rocketry or robotics…something like that. Some friends of his had this belief that fate was in the hands of mortals, that anyone could change anyone’s fate…” At this, the monk’s eyebrows shot up into his nonexistent hairline. “It seemed innocent enough,” Daenus answered defensively, but the monk just motioned for him to continue. “Anyway, uh…he stopped writing to me for about a week, so I meant to go look for him, but when I leave my house, he’s waiting for me. Didn’t quite make it to my door; he was a…a little better than he is now. I was going to bring him then, but I had to deal with some of his pursuers first…”

“I take it they’re dead now,” the monk stated drily.

“All but one. The leader. He teleported out, and I didn’t chase him down…Malcador was more important.” There was a small smile on the monk’s face; clearly he remembered how when Daenus had first lived at the temple, he would not have stopped until every single threat had been extinguished. “I brought him up here as fast as I could. Did a blood teleport to the old cave—” 

“We sealed that cave off. You shouldn’t have been able to do that,” the monk interrupted.

“Blood magic is notorious for being able to do things that shouldn’t be possible, especially when its wielder has an overpowering need for that thing to come to pass,” Tamdin answered, stepping out of the sick house. “And on that note, Daenus…I hope you can answer an old question for me.”

“Malcador—” Daenus was more than a little desperate.

“He’s stable,” Tamdin answered, and did not elaborate. Daenus closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded. “The question?”

“I’ll…try to answer.”

“How is it that you never mutated in the time you were up here? The Blood God’s influence over you was much deeper than the Lord of Change’s influence is over your son, and yet it is your son who is physically nearest to daemonhood and the point of no return.”

Daenus resolved to ask what a daemon was later, but ‘point of no return’ sounded really bad. “I…think I was mutating a while before we…before Horus and I came to you,” his voice broke slightly on his brother’s name. He had not said it for years. “I don’t…clearly remember that time. But I remember my fingers locked up. Wouldn’t move. Horus had to cut them off and regrow them…third time it happened, it felt like he filled them with fire. After that, I started getting headaches. When I told Horus about them, he did the same thing to my entire body. Eventually he explained that what he had done was cleanse my cells of everything that wasn’t…me.” Somehow the explanation sounded lame, but it was the closest to real truth he could come without elaboration on things he honestly didn’t remember.

“Do you think you could repeat what he did?” was Tamdin’s only reply.

“Maybe? I’ll give it my best shot…”

At that, Tamdin led Daenus inside the sickroom; apparently, everyone else had been evacuated in a hurry, and the only patient within was Malcador; he was writhing on the bed, clearly struggling with some inner force. Daenus’s heart ached to see it, but he wasted no time on memories. What mattered now was trying to do for his son what Horus had done for him.

_Do or do not. _Daenus’s mouth twitched as he remembered one of his favorite movies. Then he gently laid his hands on his son’s forehead and shoved against this ‘lord of change’ with all the strength of his birthright. Malcador let out an inhuman shriek; his back arched against the bed, and his mismatched wings flapped wildly. One clawed hand found Daenus’s breast and sank into it; chaotic force tried to worm its way into Daenus even as he burned it out of his son.

The chaotic force ebbed first; then the claws sloughed off. The wings fell off Malcador’s back and twitched a few moments before collapsing into ash; the hooves smoothed back into human feet. The horns were more stubborn; a portion of them was Malcador’s inheritance from his grandmother, unwilling to disappear, but eventually they too shrank back into Malcador’s forehead. He drew breath raggedly past human teeth; his blood still leaked from a variety of wounds, but now at least it was normal, human red, instead of a demonic rainbow.

Daenus slumped against the thin mattress, exhausted. His vision swam, and he couldn’t resist Tamdin leading him to another bed in the same room, one where he could see his still-unconscious son resting in an uneasy sleep. It didn’t take long for Daenus to pass out himself.

~~*~~

Malcador remained unconscious for several days after Daenus had forced the chaos out of him; enough time for Daenus to check and discover that his son would always bear some marks from the experience. He would age, even if he wouldn’t die; that part of his blood magic was disconnected, and nothing Daenus could do would fix it. More importantly, using his blood magic would draw the Lord of Change—Tzeentch, the monks named him—near the surface, and make Malcador lose control of whatever it was he was trying to do.

That hadn’t been as much of a problem with Daenus; Khorne (so the monks named his old blood god) only ever wanted blood and death, and so would always force Daenus to kill whenever possible. Tzeentch was much more crafty, and the monks had no conception of what he might do with his son’s blood magic at his command.

Daenus could hardly blame them for not even bothering to try and guess. They were talking about a creature that named itself the Lord of Change, after all. Instead, when Malcador finally woke, he explained what had happened after his son had fallen unconscious and that his son likely wouldn’t be able to use his birthright anymore. Malcador was crushed by the news.

But he drew a deep breath and told his father everything about the cult he’d gotten drawn into. They were much larger than just a small group of university students; the major meeting he’d gone to just before he’d stopped communicating included people from all over the world, many of them world leaders Malcador had previously only seen on television. The university Malcador had attended was recruitment grounds for the “soldiers” of the cult: young students who were drawn into the cult through promises of power over their own destinies, who subsequently called daemons into their bodies and slowly mutated over the course of several years, while they were trained to follow the leadership’s orders. If they did not, the daemon would take over and complete the mission anyway, subsuming and eventually consuming the human’s soul. That had happened to Melikov—the leader of the student branch of the cult. Malcador had tried to back out when it had come time to summon the daemon, but they had broken his limbs and forced it on him while he was healing.

The daemon had promptly tried to consume him, and the only thing that had stopped it was Malcador’s faith that his father would be able to help him. It had not, however, stopped the other cult members from following him through his blood portal, or stopped the daemon from deranging the portal so that he was catapulted through time as well as space. Once he had spoken with Tamdin—and wormed the story of how Daenus had known about this place out of the two of them—he agreed that it would be best for him to stay there. Even if that meant the army of Tzeentch would come down on them.

Which, of course, it did within the week. This time, none survived to report back to the rest of the cult: Daenus was too good at destroying their bodies, no matter what form they took, and Tamdin was equally good at utterly destroying the exposed souls of the daemons, so they could not report back to their master. A year later, after Tamdin was satisfied enough with Malcador’s well-being to allow him to leave, it was agreed that the two of them could return as they pleased.

Daenus did only once, again at Malcador’s side; his son had designed a sort of prosthetic brace which he had fitted to his own neck while Daenus hadn’t been looking. Malcador claimed that it would monitor the level of chaos in his blood; it would regulate it at all times, allowing Malcador to use basic forms of blood magic safely, and if it surged too strongly, it would cut Malcador’s connection to all forms of magic. Daenus wasn’t certain it would work, and wanted to experiment with it under the watchful eye of people who could detect and contain chaos. Tamdin proved fascinated by the brace once it was proven to work exactly as described; he commissioned several of them for his own monks.

Daenus left after several years’ worth of reassurances that Malcador really would be okay in the temple and really would leave if he stopped wanting to be there. It took only a little more persuading for Tamdin to get wifi set up so that Daenus and Malcador could speak as they had before the chaos gods had decided to interfere in their lives.

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooo...obviously none of this is canon. In the actual canon, we know somewhere between "fuck" and "all" about where Malcador--one of the most important figures in the early Imperium--came from, or why the Emperor trusted him so much. By which I mean at all, because as we are all aware, the Emperor didn't even trust Horus. So here is my explanation: Malcador was the Emperor's son, and they simply never said anything about it to anyone in the time of the Imperium for the same reason Superman never told anyone that he and Lois Lane were a thing. Of course Malcador was a certified grade-A badass and could defend himself against pretty much anyone, but he also had shit to do, and not having to deal with people trying to kill him all the time meant that shit got done. Also in my version, Malcador has been born way early; in actual canon, he says he's 6718 and can remember his birth down to the second (which I doubt but whatever Malcador), and this makes him significantly older.
> 
> Also child marriage is in no way okay and I hope I made that clear in the writing.
> 
> Peep ownership!  
Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
hoholupercal: Xander  
me: the writing, the Emperor's name, Tamdin, Vestral, and Aasmi


End file.
